Search This Blog

Posts

Some time ago my friend Ana Silva wrote an interesting post about a very important topic: digital literacy. Please read her post (and the comments). The main point of her post is that we should not assume people get the internet or get social media and will start working out in the open by themselves. Some do, but many need to be helped. We have to teach them, step-by-step, to be digitally literate. This is hard work.
I’ve written about this topic quite a bit as well using a different term: ‘personal knowledge management’. How do we become more productive working out in the open and using the new (and old) social concepts and tools?
As I wrote in a comment on Ana’s post, this is not a small issue. Recently the Dutch newspaper I read (nrc.nl) ran an extra section of the newspaper about ‘searching in a smarter way on the internet’ (Dutch: Slimmer zoeken op internet’). Very interesting stuff with all kinds of tips & tricks to improve the way you use the internet. But what struck me …

Now for some highlights from the vendor presentations in my second post about the SocialNow conference. Foulders has not been launched yet, but presented their concept and tool at the conference. They want to start where the users are: their email inbox. And most people have multiple inboxes. So they provide a super dashboard over all your inboxes and help you organize the tasks that come out of your email. They use language technology to help the user quickly and efficiently organize emails in tasks and folders. Podio was at the conference for the second year. I didn’t hear anything new with respect to the product. There will be a big update to the product in the very near future. Podio is still an impressive product that wants to help us overcome email and make spreadsheets better. Spreadsheets can easily be turned into open and smart Podio apps to improve collaboration and communication around them.
Another new tool to SocialNow is Wordpress with the P2 extension. Wordpress isn’t a…

The 2nd edition of the SocialNow conference was held in the beautiful city of Lisbon. As you may remember SocialNow is a unique conference. The conference is organized by Ana Neves of KnowMan. The conference is about helping organizations compare and choose internal social tools. Several Enterprise 2.0 tool vendors have to present their tool relating to the situation of a fictitious company and its issues with collaborative project work and topic-based knowledge sharing. The program is complemented with keynotes from leading experts in the field. I really enjoyed this edition of SocialNow and thought it was even better than last year. I’ll share my notes and learnings from the conference in several posts. This is post nr 1. BTW: You can find a Storify by Paul Corney of day 1 and day 2 here.ChallengesEmanuele Quintarelli kicked off the conference with a talk about the challenges of the social enterprise. As with many experts in the fields his talk was not "happy clappy". Int…

Some time ago I wrote about the usefulness of Foursquare. At
that time I shared I use Foursquare for fun, but it’s not really useful to me.
Just recently something popped up that does show Foursquare is useful to me. Part of my work is to visit customers and potential
customers. Some of the customers aren’t ready to do business with us at the
time I visit them and ask me to come back later. So, after some time, I visit
them again. Of course the company I work for has a CRM tool, but it’s a pain to
go to that system before you visit the customer to check when you were there
the last time and what you discussed. I usually just look up my notes stored
somewhere on my iPad.
But it is useful to know when I was there the last time.
When I arrive at a customer I check in to Foursquare. And what does it say?
‘Welcome back! Last time you were here was in <date>.’ The interesting
thing is the conversation with the customer almost always starts with: ‘Good to
have you back, when was the l…